This feature documentary delves into the artistic, musical and literary resonances of the myth of the road – and especially of going off the beaten track - in American lore: Westward expansion, Dust Bowl treks, hobos, postwar suburbanization and the Beat critique of it, hitchhikers, the upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s, and the latest generation of backpackers at home and abroad clutching their Lonely Planet and Rough Guides. Throughout the world the American road - from the frontier iconography of John Ford’s films through rent-a-car cross country jaunts – has inspired poetry, art, folk music, novelists and playwrights
